Hopewell Ceremonial Landscapes Of Ohio

Nearly 2000 years ago, people living in the river valleys of southern Ohio built earthen monuments on a scale that is unmatched in the archaeological record for small-scale societies. The period from c. 200 BC to c. AD 500 (Early to Middle Woodland) witnessed the construction of mounds, earthen walls, ditches, borrow pits and other earthen and stone features covering dozen of hectares at many sites and hundreds of hectares at some. The development of the vast Hopewell Culture geometric earthwork complexes such as those at Mound City, Chilicothe; Hopewell; and the Newark earthworks was accompanied by the establishment of wide-ranging cultural contacts reflected in the movement of exotic and strikingly beautiful artefacts such as elaborate tobacco pipes, obsidian and chert arrowheads, copper axes and regalia, animal figurines and delicately carved sheets of mica. These phenomena, coupled with complex burial rituals, indicate the emergence of a political economy based on a powerful ideology of individual power and prestige, and the creation of a vast cultural landscape within which the monument complexes were central to a ritual cycle encompassing a substantial geographical area. The labour needed to build these vast cultural landscapes exceeds population estimates for the region, and suggests that people from near (and possibly far) travelled to the Scioto and other river valleys to help with construction of these monumental earthen complexes. Here, Mark Lynott draws on more than a decade of research and extensive new datasets to re-examine the spectacular and massive scale Ohio Hopewell landscapes and to explore the society that created them.

"The archaeology of the ancient American Indian Hopewell earthwork-builders of the Ohio Valley has intrigued scientists and the public alike for more than 200 years. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, professional inquiry into the Hopewell phenomenon has accelerated. Contemporary researchers are approaching old questions with new methods and interpretive perspectives, state-of-the-art survey technologies, and novel analytical techniques. As a result, our understanding of the Hopewell world has significantly deepened. This two-volume set presents some of the most current research on Hopewell archaeology within the Ohio Valley and beyond. Volume One explores the monuments and ceremonies that stood at the heart of American Indian life during the Hopewell episode. Cutting-edge remote sensing studies and modern excavations add new dimensions to our understanding of the richness and complexity of Hopewell ceremonial landscapes. Novel investigations of earthwork form, design, and orientation attest to the remarkable sophistication of Hopewell geometry and astronomy. Cross-cultural comparisons and contextual analyses help us understand how Hopewell peoples' concepts of the soul may have motivated their ceremonial practices and structured their social relations. Studies of form, materials, and iconography shed light on the meanings and histories expressed in Hopewell art and craft. Volume Two turns to the world of everyday settlements and domestic life at the Brown's Bottom locality in the Ohio Hopewell core area, as well as farther afield in northern Ohio and southern Michigan. New evidence is presented for long-distance linkages between Hopewell centers in Ohio, Indiana, and Georgia. The relative importance of native cultigens in the economies of Ohio Hopewell communities is explored with new botanical and contextual data from recent research. The concluding chapter by Dr. Mark Seeman comments on the more seminal developments in Ohio Hopewell research since 2000 then turns an eye to the future"--

Indian mounds of the middle Ohio Valley : a guide to mounds and earthworks of the Adena, Hopewell, Cole, and Fort Ancient people.

This book, in two volumes, breathes fresh air empirically, methodologically, and theoretically into understanding the rich ceremonial lives, the philosophical-religious knowledge, and the impressive material feats and labor organization that distinguish Hopewell Indians of central Ohio and neighboring regions during the first centuries CE. The first volume defines cross-culturally, for the first time, the “ritual drama” as a genre of social performance. It reconstructs and compares parts of 14 such dramas that Hopewellian and other Woodland-period peoples performed in their ceremonial centers to help the soul-like essences of their deceased make the journey to an afterlife. The second volume builds and critiques ten formal cross-cultural models of “personhood” and the “self” and infers the nature of Scioto Hopewell people’s ontology. Two facets of their ontology are found to have been instrumental in their creating the intercommunity alliances and cooperation and gathering the labor required to construct their huge, multicommunity ceremonial centers: a relational, collective concept of the self defined by the ethical quality of the relationships one has with other beings, and a concept of multiple soul-like essences that compose a human being and can be harnessed strategically to create familial-like ethical bonds of cooperation among individuals and communities. The archaeological reconstructions of Hopewellian ritual dramas and concepts of personhood and the self, and of Hopewell people’s strategic uses of these, are informed by three large surveys of historic Woodland and Plains Indians’ narratives, ideas, and rites about journeys to afterlives, the creatures who inhabit the cosmos, and the nature and functions of soul-like essences, coupled with rich contextual archaeological and bioarchaeological-taphonomic analyses. The bioarchaeological-taphonomic method of l’anthropologie de terrain, new to North American archaeology, is introduced and applied. In all, the research in this book vitalizes a vision of an anthropology committed to native logic and motivation and skeptical of the imposition of Western world views and categories onto native peoples.

Buried beneath today's Midwestern towns, under several layers of earth and the accumulated debris of two thousand years, are the clues to an ancient mystery. A Native American people, now known as the Hopewell, lived and worked these lands, building earthworks which in some instances dwarf the ruins at Stonehenge. More significantly, these mammoth earthworks were built in different geometric shapes, using a standard unit of measure and aligned to the cycles of the sun and the moon. Using the foundation of existing scholarship, Mysteries of the Hopewell presents new discoveries showing the accomplishments of the Mound Builders in astronomy, geometry, measurement, and counting. William Romain then goes one step further to theorize why generations of people toiled to move millions of tons of earth to form these precise structures, joining the ranks of the Egyptians, Mayans, Greeks, Chinese, and other advanced ancient cultures. William Romain's Mysteries of the Hopewell will appeal to many readers, including anthropologists, mathematicians, and historians, but perhaps especially to readers curious about ancient cultures and seeking explanations for these magnificent earthen structures.

***THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER*** 'Hancock's books provide a fascinating, alternative version of prehistory. America Before, detailed and wide-ranging, turns what was myth and legend into a new story of the past.' Daily Mail Was an advanced civilization lost to history in the global cataclysm that ended the last Ice Age? Graham Hancock, the internationally bestselling author and television presenter, has made it his life's work to find out -- and in America Before, he draws on the latest archaeological and DNA evidence to bring his quest to a stunning conclusion. We've been taught that North and South America were empty of humans until around 13,000 years ago - amongst the last great landmasses on earth to have been settled by our ancestors. But new discoveries have radically reshaped this long-established picture and we know now that the Americas were first peopled more than 130,000 years ago - many tens of thousands of years before human settlements became established elsewhere. Hancock's research takes us on a series of journeys and encounters with the scientists responsible for the recent extraordinary breakthroughs. In the process, from the Mississippi Valley to the Amazon rainforest, he reveals that ancient 'New World' cultures share a legacy of advanced scientific knowledge and sophisticated spiritual beliefs with supposedly unconnected 'Old World' cultures. Have archaeologists focussed for too long only on the 'Old World' in their search for the origins of civilization while failing to consider the revolutionary possibility that those origins might in fact be found in the 'New World'? America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilisation is the culmination of everything that millions of readers have loved in Hancock's body of work over the past decades, namely a mind-dilating exploration of the mysteries of the past, amazing archaeological discoveries and profound implications for how we lead our lives today.

This volume examines how pre-Columbian societies in the Americas envisioned their cosmos and iteratively modeled it through the creation of particular objects and places. It emphasizes that American societies did this to materialize overarching models and templates for the shape and scope of the cosmos, the working definition of cosmoscape. Noting a tendency to gloss over the ways in which ancestral Americans envisioned the cosmos as intertwined and animated, the authors examine how cosmoscapes are manifested archaeologically, in the forms of objects and physically altered landscapes. This book’s chapters, therefore, offer case studies of cosmoscapes that present themselves as forms of architecture, portable artifacts, and transformed aspects of the natural world. In doing so, it emphasizes that the creation of cosmoscapes offered a means of reconciling peoples experiences of the world with their understandings of them.

Archaeologists and the public at large have long been fascinated by monumental architecture built by past societies. Whether considering the earthworks in the Ohio Valley or the grandest pyramids in Egypt and Mexico, people have been curious as to how pre-modern societies with limited technology were capable of constructing monuments of such outstanding scale and quality. Architectural energetics is a methodology within archaeology that generates estimates of the amount of labor and time allocated to construct these past monuments. This methodology allows for detailed analyses of architecture and especially the analysis of the social power underlying such projects. Architectural Energetics in Archaeology assembles an international array of scholars who have analyzed architecture from archaeological and historic societies using architectural energetics. It is the first such volume of its kind. In addition to applying architectural energetics to a global range of architectural works, it outlines in detail the estimates of costs that can be used in future architectural analyses. This volume will serve archaeology and classics researchers, and lecturers teaching undergraduate and graduate courses related to social power and architecture. It also will interest architects examining past construction and engineering projects.